Top JPMorgan official expected to leave

NEW YORK — JPMorgan Chase is expected to accept the resignation of one of the highest-ranking women on Wall Street after the bank lost $2 billion in a trading blunder, a person familiar with the matter said Sunday.

The bank will accept the resignation of Ina Drew, its chief investment officer, the person told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to discuss the decision publicly.

At least two other executives at the bank will be held accountable for the mistake, the person said.

The casualties come as the bank, the largest in the United States, seeks to minimize the damage caused by the $2 billion trading loss, disclosed Thursday by CEO Jamie Dimon.

Investors shaved almost 10 percent off JPMorgan’s stock price on Friday, and Dimon has said the mistake will complicate the efforts of banks to fight certain regulatory changes three years after the financial crisis.

Drew, 55, is a top lieutenant to CEO Jamie Dimon. She was paid $15.5 million last year and almost $16 million in 2010, making her one of the highest-paid officials at JPMorgan, according to a regulatory filing.

Gunman kills member of Afghan peace council

KABUL, Afghanistan — A gunman in a car assassinated a former high-ranking Taliban official working to end the decade-long war in Afghanistan, dealing a powerful blow Sunday to the fragile, U.S.-backed effort to bring peace to the country.

Arsala Rahmani, a top member of the Afghan peace council and a senator in Parliament, was killed a week before a key NATO summit and just hours before President Hamid Karzai announced the third stage of a five-part transition that is supposed to put Afghan security forces in control of their country by the end of 2014.

Police said an assassin with a silencer-equipped pistol shot Rahmani, who was in his 70s, as he was riding in his car in one of the capital’s most secure areas, near Kabul University. The gunman fired from a white Toyota Corolla that pulled up alongside Rahmani’s vehicle at an intersection. Rahmani’s driver rushed him to a hospital, but he died on the way, police said.

Rahmani was a former deputy minister of higher education in the Taliban regime that was ousted by the U.S.-led invasion in 2001. He eventually reconciled with the government and was trying to set up formal talks with the insurgents.

49 headless bodies dumped on north Mexico highway

MONTERREY, Mexico — Forty-nine bodies with their heads, hands and feet hacked off were found Sunday dumped on a northern Mexico highway leading to the Texas border in what appeared to be the latest carnage in an escalating war between Mexico’s two dominant drug cartels.

Local and federal authorities discovered the bodies before dawn lying in a pool of blood at the entrance to the desert town of San Juan, on a highway leading from the metropolis of Monterrey to the border city of Reynosa. A white stone arch welcoming visitors was spray-painted with black letters: “100% Zeta.”

Nuevo Leon state security spokesman Jorge Domene said at a news conference that the 43 men and six women would be hard to identify because of the lack of heads, hands and feet. The bodies were being taken to a Monterrey auditorium for DNA tests.

The victims could have been killed as long as two days ago at another location, then transported to San Juan, a town in Cadereyta municipality about 105 miles west-southwest of McAllen, Texas, and 75 miles southwest of the Roma, Texas, border crossing, state Attorney General Adrian de la Garza said.

De la Garza said he did not rule out the possibility that the victims were U.S.-bound migrants.

But it seemed more likely that the killings were the latest salvo in a gruesome game of tit-for-tat in fighting among brutal drug gangs.